Our Story

For the last hundred and fifty years, tens of millions have made sad, reluctant exoduses out of Southern Italy.

And as with all emigration, each individual departure contained a private gamble, of the heavyhearted sacrifice of language, of cuisine, of culture and even family ties, in exchange for economic stability. All first-generation immigrants know this wager intimately, the process usually lasting longer than a lifetime.

Today though, things here in Italy are starting to change.

We are the new South.

We are a business peopled by those that have moved back.

Educated and trained abroad, we’ve returned after years of work experience spent in Japan, England, Poland, Germany, America and China. We have degrees in tourism, the humanities, law, marketing and languages. We have studied wine, formally. We publish.

Each of us has returned out of a love of this place, of the culture, the land, the food and wine, and the people. But what makes our brand of provincialism new is that the degree of sober study behind it: ours is not based on not knowing anything else but BY knowing something else.

It’s not enough- say- to offer you world-class extra virgin during your visit, but we teach you why it is (in acidity, polyphenols, genetics, pruning, pressing and harvesting techniques). We’re telling you not just because we love it, but because we know what there is to love about it.

We’ve studied the IGT, DOC and DOCG laws and can tell you why the Southern Italian wine in your glass stands out as something special. We can explain nepotism as the souvenir of thousand of years of invasions. We know the geography. We know and celebrate the human gems that keep our culture and cuisine burning bright here, and we’re eager to introduce you to them.

For each of us on staff, this is more than just a cooking class or wine class. We know that tourism can be a positive effect on a community, and that if properly focused it can reinforce- rather than dismantle- all of the things that make this part of the world so special.

Whether it’s a cookery course at our cooking school in Lecce, or a wine course at the castle, from how to make our extra virgin, to bicycling Puglia, as a way of learning more about Italian agriculture and vineries.